Lighting at the Power Plant at Lucky Strike

It is September 17th, 2010 about 11am. I am at the Power Plant at Lucky Strike building in Richmond, VA. This is one of three of the original buildings that belonged to the Lucky Strike cigarette company back in the 1930's when Richmond was a big cigarette-making town. At the time, the building's purpose was to provide the electricity to the neighboring building which was the factory for making cigarettes. Today, however, the building serves as a commercial space for Odell Associates, an architect firm.

As I enter the space I am immediately taken aback by the volume of natural light that fills the space. There is really no need for artificial lighting at all. Tall fenestrations take up most of each of the four walls, leaving very little brick for structural purposes. In addition, two large skylights that span from the front of the building to the back can be found in the ceiling. The intensity of the light is not overwhelming by any means, it is really the perfect amount of light. And, because of where the building is situated, there is no direct sunlight at this time. I imagine the interior space of building will not experience any direct sunlight until about 3pm when the sun is more south in the sky and headed towards the west. The color of the light is warm, perhaps just a bit yellow-y. This might be due to the fact that the bricks that make up the majority of the building's structural shell are a beige color that looks like it's accumulated a nice patina to it over the years. The amount of exitance appears to be almost non-existance because the materials in the space do not have high reflectance qualities and so there is not much surface area for the light to refect off of. This is nice because that means there is very little glare, if any at all, and it also means there is very little luminance. There is, however, a great deal of illumance occuring in the space because of the shear number of windows. The illuminance is not overpowering, and as I said, there is very little direct sunlight entering the space at this time.

I would not change anything about the lighting in the space, at least for the time and day in which I visited it. Even though there was a great deal of illumance due to the number and size of fenestrations, my eyes needed very little adaptation upon entering the space. And, because I was taking pitcures and measurements while I was there, I found the brightness very easy and comfortable for working conditions.

L. Miller